Crytek are back after there long absence after Ubisoft destroyed the Far Cry series on the consoles. Backed by EA, Crytek attempted to make a PC game that would make all console gamers wish they had bought a decent rig. That game is Crysis. And yes...they succeeded. Combining the tried and tested Far Cry free roam formula with a face lift and the introduction of a suit of power amour Crysis is defiantly a game that will appeal to most FPS gamers...if there PC doesn't run away in fear.

This guy had super nano-technology strength that helps him fight alien robot's. Inventive eh?

The main meat of Crysis is its single player campaign which puts you and a team of elite Nano suit wearing super soldiers onto an island filled with Koreans as well as other, not so human things. You traverse huge enviroments that vary from thick jungle, beaches, open plains, snowy peaks and gravityless alien mother ships. These environments(minus the later) are pretty generic. You've seen similar landscapes in the Far Cry series. But what makes the scenery so good is the graphics. Crysis is one of those games that will make your jaw drop every time you put in the disk. There is so much detail in every aspect of the environment from trees that collapse from precisely where you shoot, to the eye popping explosions to the crabs that wander the ocean floors. Crytek have created a world that does not look real...it IS real. Theres day and night, wild life wander around the landscapes, swim the oceans and fly in the skies, grass and trees sway in the breeze. But, it has absolutely no meaning. You can shoot down the trees and kill the animals but thats it. They spent to much time making tiny details for the sake of graphics and it makes you wish that they spent that time refining game play or making the game longer or adding a multi player mode worth playing. Crysis lasts roughly 10 hours and whilst Crysis is a joy to look at during this time, it does raise some eye brows in other areas. One such problem is the story. It is a joke. Go rescue some people, kill some aliens then it ends. Its really well layed out, but it doesn't have that WOW factor that makes you want to play the game to see how it ends. On a whole the sound is rather disappointing.

The jungle is lush, and quite visuall impressive.

Characters are another such disappointment. You encounter very few friendlies in Crysis and 9/10 times its a team mate you met in the first minute of the game. Generally speaking they are rubbish. Everyone but Psyco who is a English loud mouth, keeps there heads down and listens to the clueless Sgt, and none of them get any development. They get dropped in a war zone and pretty much die to add some suspense. But considering the story is pretty weak you will soon forget who was with you to begin with and who died. Crysis makes up for this flaw by covering it with graphical polish again. The first scene with your team is pretty much like watching a movie. The nano suits shine and animate as if they were an extension of the skin, the faces move with realism and the 'jump' to the island just shows off what the engine can do. On several occasions you would think you were looking at a photograph. One such occasion was when you rescue a Korean archaeologist. A shame they couldn't make the characters remotely interesting to go with the visuals. They do however have great voicing talent. There is never a badly delivered line, and whilst what they have to say isn't always that interesting, its how they say it that makes you pay attention. From sarges dominating voice to psychos Brittish accented banter the game is a treat for the ears when it comes to the communication. Enemy voicing is used multiple times throughout the game but whats interesting is when you play they game on the highest difficulty because all the Koreans actually speak Korean which doesn't make much difference but it does add to the overall presentation.

The firefights are stunningly impressive in more ways than one.

Luckily for Crysis it has some pretty good game play to back up all the fancy visuals. The nano suit is not just for show, it is the main way of dealing with opponents. You have 4 abilities attached to the suit, as well as other equipment based skills. You can use Strength to jump insane heights, punch down walls, pick up enemies and throw them miles, aim more accurately and punch vehicles over. You also get speed which lets your character run faster or sprint at a blistering pace for a short while to get you closer or further away from enemies depending on the situation. In addition to this you get your Default power Armour. Armour drains you energy bar before your health making you resilient to enemy weapons letting you run in with little worry of getting shot and finally you have the ever useful Cloak. Cloak as the name implies makes your character invisible for varying amounts of time depending on what your doing (walking, running, standing still, shooting). These powers are all useful and make you think on how to deal with your foes. Do you conserve ammo and smash there heads in with a tire using your increased strength? do you sneak in undetected and silently dispatch the enemy one by one? do you sprint past the base before they even no whats happening? or do you throw on some Armour and gun them all down? These decisions are made even more varied by an ability rather than power. You get the option to customize weapons on the fly adding sleeper darts, reflex scopes, silencers and laser pointers to help tailor to your playing style. And finally you have the Binocs. These let you pinpoint enemy locations on the mini map letting you recon and area before you make your approach making it that much easier to kill the enemy. When you add the multiple entry points to all the encounters due to the environments you can tackle a battle several times but in a different way making replaying the game a joy essentially doubling the length of the campaign. Its a shame that you don't really get that much in the way of weapons. You get the standards like the machine gun, shotgun and sniper and a few uber weapons such as the rocket launcher and Gauss Cannon but overall the weapon selection is rather weak and doesn't compliment the suit all that well. Add to this the abysmal vehicle controls and you get enjoyable game play that might get slightly boring with the lack of variety.

Brilliant art design the game has.

The AI also gets tiring. They aren't dumb, just badly designed. You often get enemies looking right at you and not noticing you with a rocke